May 14, 2023, I Will Not Leave You as Orphans, John 14:15-24 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ May 14, 2023 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to this sermon, click the link above. Below you will find an outline of the sermons.

When we lived in St. Louis, a long time ago, one of our friends, Cal, was a social worker. He worked in the inner city, where there was a lot of poverty, a lot of struggling families, a lot of people who were barely making it in a lot of different ways. And there was one family Cal visited whose child was 2 or 3 years old, but had never spoken a word. Cal, of course, was very concerned about this child’s development. He was healthy in every other way: he seemed to get enough food, he was clothed adequately, his living situation seemed safe enough. So Cal talked to the parents to try to find out more about their child, to find out what might be wrong with him, and in the course of the conversation he learned one crucial thing: they never spoke to him. It had never occurred to them to talk to their little boy when they were changing him or bathing him or dressing him or putting him to bed. “He doesn’t know any words,” the mother said, “why should I talk to him?”

That is an extreme case, and I hope it’s very rare. But it illustrates in kind of a shocking way how important all those beyond-the-basics things that mothers and fathers do with their children, how crucial they are to the nurturing of a healthy, whole human being. All that baby-talk during bathtime, all that cuddling at bedtime, all those songs and stories, holding hands and piggyback rides – all those things are not just sweet and wonderful and fun – they are essential for life, just as essential as vitamins and regular sleep and proper hygiene. Maybe even more so.

The gospel reading today continues on with what Jesus said to his disciples at that last dinner they shared together. They knew that Jesus was about to leave them, even though they really didn’t know yet what was about to happen, or how they were going to handle it all. Today we read his words of reassurance to them. And I want to zero in on one word that he used. “I’ll come back,” he promised. And he said, “I will not leave you orphaned.”

Orphaned. It’s such a specific word. Jesus could have told his disciples that he wouldn’t leave them without a leader or a teacher or a master or a guide or even a shepherd. But what he promised them is that he wouldn’t leave them without a parent. He promised not to leave them without someone who would love them. Without someone who would touch them. Without someone who would talk to them and listen to them, someone who would kiss their hurts; someone who would know them intimately.

When we think of the coming of the Holy Spirit, as we will in a couple of weeks on the feast of Pentecost, as we will this week at the Deanery Confirmation service, we think of the Spirit’s role in giving us spiritual gifts for us to use for the building up of the church: gifts like hospitality and giving and teaching and prophecy and administration and healing – the whole gamut of gifts that make the church a living, functioning organism. Those are incredibly important.

And in a closely-related way, we think of the Spirit’s role in empowering us, giving us courage and boldness and wisdom, like Peter who was transformed from a bumbling fisherman into a Billy Graham-quality preacher in the literal blink of an eye, like Stephen who gave a powerful testimony even as he was being stoned to death; like our own St. Philip, who was whisked away by the Spirit to meet an Ethiopian eunuch in his chariot, puzzling over the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah.

But what we often forget to expect from the Holy Spirit is love – maybe partly because for many people that word has been either sentimentalized into sickly-sweet oblivion or reduced to its animal forms of passion and lust.

But Jesus isn’t talking about sentiment here; he’s not talking about power or abilities; and he certainly isn’t talking about self-gratification. “I’m not leaving you as orphans,” he promised them. “I will come to you; I will be with you.” “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

Paul wrote this to the church in Galatia: “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries, ‘Abba, Father’, and it is this that makes you his child.” The word, Father, can sound very formal to us but Paul uses the word Abba, which is a much more intimate word – Abba is more like ‘Daddy’ or ‘Papa.’ God sends his Spirit to draw us close to him in the kind of relationship a little child has with her Daddy and Mommy.

Of course we’ve all had parents that were flawed – some of us have been deeply wounded by the failures of that first and most basic relationship in our lives. But God promises us what no parent can promise absolutely. “Can a woman forget her nursing child,” God says through Isaiah, “that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget,” – as unthinkable as that is – “yet I will not forget you.” That is the promise.

The church often likes to focus on denouncing the sin in the world. One branch of the church divides from another over what sin deserves the greatest condemnation: are sexual sins the hallmark of evil in our world, or is it social injustice, or is it something else? Where do we need to focus the purifying laser of our condemnation most sharply?

And we fail to recognize the overwhelming loneliness that feeds every sin – that sense, that has long been present, but that metastacized, I think, during the pandemic, that each of us are isolated beings, adrift in an uncaring and unknowing cosmos. What is behind the horror of all these shootings, the political rage, behind so much of the despair and lack of purpose we see all around us? We live in a world of orphans.

But we have this assurance to offer in the face of this cosmic loneliness: Jesus promised, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” There is a home whose doors are open to everyone. There is a family whose love is unlimited, because its parent is God himself, the Lord, who says to us., “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”